Here is an excerpt from an article I read on this site. Read below:

The first and most obvious potential benefit is to gain new customers by exposing your business in another online venue. But to do this you need to be creative and interesting in a social setting. Think of it like going to a party with the aim of picking up business vs. picking up business at a business conference – you will need to act differently in the “social media” arena than on your business’ website. You need to stand out and say something of interest to the people in your arena.

Blogging about the benefits of your products/services is not going to attract viral marketing (i.e. friends telling friends about a web page) – you can leave your product/service information to your standard web site. To attract interest and any sort of following you need to offer opinions, advice and stories of interest or humor.

The second and less obvious benefit from blogging and “tweeting” can come from links you place on these social websites back to your company website. While there are a number of aspects that go into increasing traffic to your website, links remain one very important aspect. This is because every link to your site that exists on the web counts as a vote towards your Google page rank.

The more links that you have on the web, the higher your ranking will be in the search engines – which means more people will discover your website. You can place links in the body of your messages and you can leave them in your message “signature” as well. In time, the search engines will deep scan the web and find those forum links.

Content is (still) King

Read our previous article on why content is important.

Whatever social medium you choose to utilize – DO NOT SPAM! Have something to say and do not just attempt to blatantly ask people to click on your link. This will of course not work with any legitimate potential customers – but possibly more damaging could be blacklisting by the social website. When posting to forums and blogs stick to areas which are relevant to your business – this is obvious for a few reasons but not least in that it will keep you interested and provoke ideas from you.

If you contribute to online social networks with quality and interesting posts (and tweets!) then your presence will be appreciated and your efforts should go rewarded with new inquiries for your business.

Links to Popular Social Websites:

Twitter – www.twitter.com
Facebook – www.facebook.com
Linked In – www.linkedin.com
Orkut – www.orkut.com
Digg- www.digg.com